Robert Pirsig, 1928 – 2017

by | Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was one of those books that have influenced me deeply. I read it when I was in high school and read it again and again, almost obsessively for a while. It was my companion through college, graduate school and beyond. I assigned sections from it in my master’s and doctoral courses. This is a book that changed me, and its impact on my thinking resonates even today.

Robert Prisig died yesterday. I owe him, and his ideas, a great debt. In his homage, are two images I created today, once I heard the new, from one of my favorite quotes from the book.

languageart-001
languageart-002

Note: I edited the quote a bit when I created the designs. The complete (and accurate quote) is “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or as the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Chinese-English Ambigrams

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New presentation tool

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TPACK Newsletter #3: May09 Edition

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TPACK Handbook, new review

Just found out about a review of the Handbook of TPACK by Dorian Stoilescu and Douglas McDougall for the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology (2009). You can read the full review here. Overall a positive review, with some pertinent criticism, particularly...

Nerdview or being stuck in our worldview

I recently received a note from a graduate student as an unnamed university. This student wrote to me after having assigned the TPACK handbook chapter (co-authored with Matt Koehler) to a bunch of pre-service teachers, and suggested that the chapter was hard to read,...

We feel fine

We Feel Fine is a web-installation, "a self-organizing particle system," art project that is powerful and touching - building as it does on people's emotions, harvested from blog postings from around the world. As the designers say, "We hope it makes the world seem a...

By the Numbers

I just discovered a blog by Charles Blow, visual Op-Ed columnist for the NYTimes. Titled By the Numbers it is a site for "discussion about all things statistical — from the environment to entertainment — and their visual expressions." Pretty cool. Check it out.

Mind power: Brain Machine Interfaces

Imagine controlling machines, typing text or juggling balls using nothing but the power of thought. What sounds like far-fetched science fiction is gradually becoming possible, providing hope for disabled patients -- and new gimmicks for the computer gaming industry....

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